Abstract
The technology of virtual metrology (VM) has been applied in the semiconductor industry to convert sampling inspection with metrology delay into real time and online total inspection. The purpose of this study is trying to apply VM for inspecting machining precision of machine tools. However, machining processes will cause severe vibrations that make process data collection, data cleaning, and feature extraction difficult to handle. Thus, the tasks of how to accurately segment essential parts of the raw process data from the original numerical-control file, how to effectively handle raw process/sensor data with low signal-to-noise ratios, and how to properly extract significant features from the segmented and clean raw process data are challenging issues for successfully applying VM to machine tools. These issues are judiciously addressed and successfully resolved in this paper. Testing results of machining standard workpieces and cellphone shells of two three-axis CNC machines show that the proposed approach of applying VM to accomplish total precision inspection of machine tools is promising.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Chevalier Falcon Machine Tool Manufacturer in Taiwan for providing the raw data used in the illustrative examples and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of China for financially supporting this research. The authors would also like to thank the Advanced Institute of Manufacturing with High-tech Innovations (AIM-HI), National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan for financially supporting this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.